Tim Goodman: Review: 'Women's Murder Club' - bonding over crime

{} {Tim Goodman }

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, October 11, 2007

Photo: VIVIAN ZINK

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WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB - "Blind Dates and Bleeding Hearts" - Jill takes a huge risk in order to help a teenaged girl after her mother is brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Lindsay considers dating again and Claire attempts to bring the romance back into her relationship, on "Women's Murder Club," FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (9:00-10:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network. (ABC/VIVIAN ZINK)
ANGIE HARMON less

WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB - "Blind Dates and Bleeding Hearts" - Jill takes a huge risk in order to help a teenaged girl after her mother is brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Lindsay considers dating again and Claire ... more

Photo: VIVIAN ZINK

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WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB - "Blind Dates and Bleeding Hearts" - Jill takes a huge risk in order to help a teenaged girl after her mother is brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Lindsay considers dating again and Claire attempts to bring the romance back into her relationship, on "Women's Murder Club," FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (9:00-10:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network. (ABC/RICHARD CARTWRIGHT)
AUBREY DOLLAR, ANGIE HARMON, LAURA HARRIS, PAULA NEWSOME less

WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB - "Blind Dates and Bleeding Hearts" - Jill takes a huge risk in order to help a teenaged girl after her mother is brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Lindsay considers dating again and Claire ... more

There are all kinds of sadness in "Women's Murder Club," the new ABC series set in San Francisco that starts tonight. For instance, there's a kind of choking-back-the-tears sadness after watching the pilot, that hour being tragically lost forever. (All right, 45 minutes. Which may be sadder, because it felt like four or five nights.) There's a choking-back-the-laughter element that someone at ABC thought to send a second episode. That's just sad - what, TV critics don't have lives? We'll just watch anything? We're dumb enough to endure another 45 minutes of bad writing, bad acting and bad storytelling?

See? Big, steaming piles of sad.

"Women's Murder Club" is based on the novels of James Patterson. Are they nearly as bad as this show? That would be - well, you know.

But it gets worse. Even worse than the title. This series is aimed at women, which is why there are four women at the core of the show and why it's airing on Friday night. (Most shows on Friday nights are aimed at women. And, yes, if you're a woman, that should make you sad.) Two women wrote the first episode. That it portrays women so poorly and one-dimensionally and manages, in the end, to set up a serial-killer story line in which the female victims' mouths are sewn shut is both disturbing and sad.

In order to stop writing the word "sad" over and over again, thus partaking in the same kind of hackery evident in "Women's Murder Club," a word swap will now be made.

"Women's Murder Club" is bad. It is all kinds of bad.

In no particular order of importance, here's the baddest of the bad:

-- It stars Angie Harmon, a good actress who has done far better work, in a role that turns her into a workaholic, sexless (two years and counting) detective named Lindsay who ruined her marriage to Tom (Rob Estes) because she spent all her time trying to solve that serial-killer case where the victims had their lips sewn together. Now, Tom is her boss (oooooh) and though she won't admit it, she's secretly still in love with him (ahhhhhh), and at the end of the episode, he tells her he's getting married (groan). Oh, don't worry, you wouldn't have made it to that point anyway.

-- Kyle Secor, a wonderful actor, has a guest role here that - if you've ever watched "Homicide: Life on the Street" - will make you cry. Yes, from the sadness of him having to take the part. It's a bad part. But he gets to fling things off the desk of Jill (Laura Harris), who's an assistant D.A., and then have sex with her. But she's about to move in with another guy. A really nice guy. She's conflicted. In a club, there's often one who is conflicted. Says Jill: "Moving in leads to marriage and marriage leads to ... ick." Man trouble. There's always man trouble on Friday nights. Ick.

-- "Women's Murder Club" posits that women like to be in clubs. Girl bonding and all. It helps to be in a club so that women can talk to each other the way women do. Although they don't actually say, "You go, girl," in the pilot, they might in the second episode, which went unwatched.

-- Paula Newsome is another fine actress reduced to playing the wise, all-knowing medical examiner, named Claire. She has to tell the other women that being married isn't so bad. It's a lot of hard work, but rewarding. Her husband is in a wheelchair. She has a loving family. She's everybody's shoulder. According to the latest charts, women like shoulders.

-- There's a crime reporter in "Women's Murder Club," too. Her name is Cindy (Aubrey Dollar) and she sets female journalists back, oh, about 25 years. The pilot episode is called "Welcome to the Club," mostly because girlish Cindy looks to be joining the cop, the district attorney and the medical examiner in a crime-solving foursome. She has to be young and quirky. The newbie. She's involved because the pilot starts with the murder of a workaholic female reporter, though not sexless. We know this because when the women look at her dead, nude body, they comment on, uh, the lower trim work: "With maintenance like that, she must have been seeing somebody," one says.

Oh, perhaps to offset how far Cindy will set back female journalists, the workaholic dead one is said to have won six Pulitzer Prizes in 10 years. Perhaps all that "maintenance" was for the Pulitzer judges? As an aside, the dead reporter had a stalker. But because she was a lonely workaholic, she actually liked her stalker. Did you know this episode was written by two women?

-- Though you shouldn't watch "Women's Murder Club" for a variety of reasons, let's just stick with this portrayal of weak or incomplete women for a second and ponder how offensive that might be if, say, two men had written this episode. And when you find out who killed the workaholic reporter, let's just say this theory will be extended.

-- Someone actually tells Harmon's character that you don't realize you're a workaholic until you love a job for 10 or 12 years and then wake up only to realize it didn't hug you back. Is that sad or bad?

-- There's more to tell, but why repeat the smart-women-foolish-choices thing? When you hear the bad writing, see the embarrassing character portrayals and suffer through the agonizing 45 minutes, there will only be one thing left to do: Play some Old Maid. Kidding! You'll want to sew your eyes shut instead.

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